you're gonna take the whole world with you
by McMuffin
Summary: Teddy and Andrew's first meeting over day old hotdogs.


_Wow, I really suck at crossposting. I wrote this over two months ago and haven't posted it here until now... sorry. This was for my Shondaland Big Bang on LiveJournal. This is how I imagine Teddy and Andrew's first meeting to have gone, and I'm well aware that they are now a thing of the past and Teddy/Henry are the current Teddy!Ship, but whatever. Teddy/Andrew were adorable, as are Teddy/Henry. And now I will stop rambling about Teddy. This was beta'd by supershipper. :)  
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you're gonna take the whole world with you when you go

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Teddy rolls her neck on her shoulders and stretches out her back after a particularly long surgery. She's standing in the unusually desolate cafeteria, attempting to make the tough decision between a plain bagel and a cinnamon one. It's been just over a month since death plagued the hospital, but still a cloud of morbidity shrouds the building. She misses the familiarity of the people she's grown to be friends with, seeing only a few faces during her days at work. The patient count seems to have dropped also, with the hospital lacking its usual calamity. She stumbles upon empty corridors and patient rooms a thousand times more than she used to, so when she needs to cry there's always a welcoming private space. The nurses' chatter has dwindled and the hospital is a much milder place - mild in terms of generality, it's the opposite in terms of memories. She's tapping her foot on the floor to create some kind of background noise as she contemplates sugar or none, even the cafeteria workers are silent.

"You appear to know the cafeteria better than I do... So can you please tell me whether the pizza or the hotdogs are going to be more detrimental to my health?" A male voice breaks through her calorie counting from somewhere to her right.

She turns to face the smirking tall stranger, taking in his good looks in an instant while biting back the 'go away' she intends to send to any man who vaguely resembles Mark Sloan in terms of hitting on her, and replacing it with a crooked smile. "Well I can tell you the hotdogs are at least a day old, and the pizza dough's usually raw, so I'd go with a bagel."

"A bagel?" he glances down at the selection of food, "They have cinnamon and plain, which would you recommend?"

"I'm currently trying to decide myself, actually," she laughs softly and glances at the glass-protected food.

"Well how about you get plain, I'll get cinnamon and we can split them?" Teddy's eyebrows raise slightly and the stranger cracks a grin, "Andrew. Andrew Perkins."

Teddy's lips widen to match his, "Teddy Altman."

"It's nice to meet you, Teddy," he smiles. "You're a surgeon?" He deduces from the colour of her scrubs, learning from his first morning at Seattle Grace Mercy West that surgeons - or at least, surgical attendings seem to wear navy scrubs.

She nods. "Cardio. And you? Are you..."

"Psychiatrist," he tells to her somewhat relief, it only just occurring to her that maybe he's a patient and she shouldn't flirt with patients - but he's not, so it's okay.

"You're a shrink," she says wryly.

"We're not all bad," he jokes, well aware of the connotations of his profession.

"Oh, I know," Teddy glances at the ground, "I respect your field."

"I'm glad, most surgeons don't," he senses some mind-wandering from Teddy and grabs her attention again by ordering the bagels.

Andrew offers to pay for both and is met with resistance from Teddy. It's an impromptu date and she barely knows the guy, so she doesn't want him to pay, but he argues that if this were a bar she'd let him buy her a drink, so she should let him buy her a bagel. He pays and they take their conversation to a table.

"So, you work here?" Teddy asks as she smears cream cheese on her half of the plain bagel.

"As of this morning, yes. And you? Have you worked here long?" he's heard that the hospital has brought in some other doctors to perform surgeries in the absence of their best, and wonders if she is one of them. She's definitely not a doctor in need of his medical clearance or he would've recognized her name from his patient list.

"About six months," she tells him before biting into the bagel and suppressing an 'mmm' as apparently that sounds very sexual when it comes from her mouth (according to Arizona) and she's not one for blatant seduction with strangers.

Andrew's silent for a moment, chewing his half of the plain bagel in hesitation, "So you... Were involved in the shooting?" he asks after he swallows.

Teddy, too, pauses and swallows her mouthful, nodding, "Yes, I was."

Andrew doesn't know what else to say, she's not a patient of his so she's clearly better off than some of the other surgeons, but at the same time he doesn't know how involved she was. Plus he doesn't want to come off as merely a shrink - a problem he's had when dating in the past. Luckily, Teddy's sick of talking to herself like a crazy person about the shooting, and after brief consideration, she jumps into ramble-mode about it.

"It was crazy, that day. It started off like a normal day, I had a patient who got shot by an angry driver after some road rage... I was ignoring Owen - Dr. Hunt - because he told Derek - Dr. Shepherd - to basically give my job away... It was a pretty normal day, I was operating on my patient... Then we went into lockdown and it wasn't normal anymore," she's waving around her bagel as she speaks, staring out at the cloudy sky and not catching Andrew's eye as he watches the bagel travel through the air. She continues, "The angry driver was shooting up the place, killing people... Owen and I only found this out after finishing our surgery, so we took the patient to post-op - "

"You took the patient to post-op? What about the lock down?" Andrew interrupts for the first time, almost raising his eyebrows in disbelief.

"Well our patient needed to get to post-op so we took him there.," she replies like it was nothing serious, "Owen was frustrating as usual, he couldn't make up his mind between Cristina and I... Anyway," Teddy remembers the downsides of talking about your exes (even if Owen's not technically an ex) to potential boyfriends and returns to ranting about the shooting. She's only rehashing her day, but it feels good to be able to tell someone without them breaking down at the mention of the day.

"So we took our patient outside the hospital because we figured that we could get him to anther hospital... And Owen ran back inside to get Cristina. I..." She trails off, not quite remembering what she did next. "I did something... Talked to the police, I think, then when Alex Karev needed to get transferred I went in the ambulance with Lexie and Mark..."

Andrew recognizes these names from his patient list, and continues chewing slowly on his bagel, watching as hers briefly moves from the air to her mouth, then begins being waved around again.

"I mean, seriously though, a bunch of people got shot by a man wearing his people-shooting-hat and many of then died over, what, a few hours? What the hell did the SWAT team do? They were there when Owen and I got outside, but yet, he, my best friend, still managed to get shot!" It's clear that she's angry about this, and Andrew struggles to not smile as she almost drops the bagel on the floor. "They should have given me a gun, I'd have sorted it out!"

Andrew does smile when she actually drops the bagel on the ground by flinging her arms in the air. He offers her his half-eaten bagel and she shakes her head and picks up her portion of the cinnamon bagel instead.

"Are you sure that giving you a gun would've been the best thing?" he asks, highly intrigued and amused by this woman's bagel-waving-rambling.

"I was in the army for almost a decade, I would've damn well been better than that SWAT team," she huffs and bites into the cinnamon bagel, her rant completed.

"You were in the army?"

Teddy nods, her mouth full, "I was... With Owen. We met in Baghdad not long after nine-eleven."

"What was your reason for joining the army?" Andrew asks, he's always been curious about people's reasons for joining. As a trauma counselor, he's seen a lot of soldiers after they've returned home.

"My best friend died in the nine-eleven attacks," Teddy tells him, finding him incredibly easy to talk to.

"So you're from New York then?" He doesn't apologize for her loss, the simplicity in her statement telling him that she's grieved enough, and he knows all too well that people don't always want to hear 'I'm sorry.'

"I did live there... But I've lived all over the place - Dallas, D.C., Rochester, New York... Then I was in the army, and now here. How about you?"

"I'm Canadian, I grew up in Dartmouth, then I moved to Montreal for college and med school... Then I moved to New Jersey and I'm mostly there but at other places when needed, like here."

"So you won't be here long?" she asks curiously, the other bagel now frozen in the air just below her mouth.

"I'll be sticking around," he replies with a coy smile.

Teddy nods, masking a smile by biting into the cinnamon bagel, "This bagel is so much better than the last."

"Clearly. You did toss the other one on the ground," Andrew jokes.

"That was an accident!" Teddy exclaims, "I would never throw away a bagel on purpose. Even if it is a plain one."

"Hey now, don't hate on the plain bagels, _sweet tooth_," Andrew chuckles.

"You seem to agree that the cinnamon bagels are better, _sweet tooth_. You scoffed that cinnamon one down in a second," Teddy flashes him a wide grin and he smiles.

"Touché."

Teddy grins and takes one last bite of the cinnamon bagel before popping the last piece into her mouth and brushing the crumbs that litter her scrubs to the ground. The cafeteria's still silent around them - stoic, save for the smiling movement in the middle of the picture frame.

"So what other kinds of food do you like, besides bagels?" He's smoothly inquiring into her culinary tastes for future dates, and she likes that he's already asking her this question.

"I love Chinese food, and Indian... Anything spicy. Not a huge fan of pizza, unless it's while I'm watching sports on tv. Oh, and I absolutely love ice-cream. Chocolate ice-cream would probably be my favorite food," she tells him as she leans back in her chair, loosening her vertebrae in a rewarding stretch.

"You really are a sweet tooth. Chocolate ice-cream is barely food," Andrew laughs but very meticulously stores the information in his mind.

"It is too. I guess I'm just a kid at heart..." Teddy laughs, slightly nervous now that she's telling him more and more about her, and grabs her paper napkin from the table. Andrew cocks his head in a curious way and she is prompted to share more. "My favorite movie is Finding Nemo, tell me that's not childish," she says, finding her face mirroring his as he grins in amusement.

"As long as your favorite band's not the Spice Girls..." Andrew's face appears serious but his voice tells another story, an amused layer resonating in the sound.

"Excuse me! Stop right now, thank you very much," she says while wearing a shit-eating grin and he appears shocked for a moment, jaw dropped in surprise. "Kidding."

Andrew stays frozen for a moment, then he chuckles, leaning forward in his chair and grinning at her. Her stomach does a flip at his wide grin, and she finds it crazy that she's already so drawn to him. "You're good," he tells her with a smirk.

"I know," Teddy replies cockily, with a smirk to match. Andrew's lips part slightly, and he seems to be stuck for words when a foreign beeping interrupts their lunch and the surgeon glances down at her pager. "Emergency in the pit. I've got to go, damn."

The 'damn' slips out, and Teddy hopes for the moment it takes her to stand up that she hasn't appeared too eager. However; Andrew echoes her sentiments and stands up chivalrously with a smile.

"So, I'll see you... Later?" he asks as Teddy scrunches up the paper napkin in her hands and nods.

"Page me," she tells him with a wink before dashing off to the pit, the hospital having lost the cloud that previously surrounded it.

* * *

the end


End file.
